


The Work We Are Given

by Cherepashka



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Family Issues, Friendship, Gen, Nargothrond, Politics, and Elf-nerds who find themselves shoehorned into it, complicated family dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-15 05:56:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20861351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cherepashka/pseuds/Cherepashka
Summary: “May I join you?”Celebrimbor nearly fell from his perch. He had not thought anyone followed him, let alone—Recovering himself, he peered over the edge of the loft floor to confirm the evidence of his ears. And, yes, there among the barley bins stood Orodreth, his face cast into sharp relief by the lamps along the walls and looking sterner than Celebrimbor had ever seen it.





	The Work We Are Given

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lingwiloke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lingwiloke/gifts).

> So many delightful prompts, it was hard to choose! But I have a soft spot for Celebrimbor and Orodreth's friendship, though I haven't written them before. Hope you enjoy, Lingwiloke!
> 
> This fic follows the Orodreth-as-Finarfin's-son version of events. 
> 
> Quenya names:
> 
> Celebrimbor – Tyelperinquar/Tyelpë  
Orodreth – Artaresto  
Finrod – Findaráto

Afterward, Celebrimbor found himself in a little lofted space above the grain stores, with no particular memory of making his way there. He only knew that he could not have stayed a moment longer in the audience hall, where whispers and questions and memories of his father’s face flitted around him like the bats in Nargothrond’s lesser-used caverns. 

He didn’t need to hear the murmurs to know that many of the city’s people thought him still loyal to his father, however at odds they might be; and if he was not, well, that just made him even less trustworthy, didn’t it? A son who would betray his own father would hardly balk at betraying his adopted city, too. 

Still worse were those who would have praised him, who thought him a lost child led astray by a conniving father and cruel uncle, and who wanted to acclaim him now for having the courage to repudiate their deeds.

Courage, Celebrimbor thought bitterly, had nothing to do with it. 

With a shaky exhale he leant his head back against the stone. Some Elves preferred to abide under leaf and sky, but he had never minded stone over his head. In any case the dry, cool draught against his face told him that this space, though underground, vented through hidden fissures in the rock to the outside air. The smooth stone at his back spoke of patient hands and craftspeople who knew how to work in concert with the natural processes of water and erosion rather than against them. Dwarven work, Celebrimbor thought, and old. What had they used this space for, before the Eldar came to Nargothrond? Perhaps he was not the first to come here to be alone. 

“May I join you?” 

Celebrimbor nearly fell from his perch. He had not thought anyone followed him, let alone—

Recovering himself, he peered over the edge of the loft floor to confirm the evidence of his ears. And, yes, there among the barley bins stood Orodreth, his face cast into sharp relief by the lamps along the walls and looking sterner than Celebrimbor had ever seen it. 

Too startled to do anything else, Celebrimbor nodded, and his cousin—his _king_, now—clambered up the loft ladder and settled beside him. Celebrimbor braced himself. A reprimand was surely coming. His departure from the main audience hall had been abrupt at best, outright churlish at worst. Perhaps more than a reprimand, he realized, feeling cold: Orodreth might have decided that allowing him to remain in Nargothrond at all was not worth the dissension Celebrimbor’s presence would sow among the rest of his subjects. Where would he go if Orodreth turned him out? Not to his father, not now. The Falas, perhaps; it had after all been Celegorm who led the first charge to deliver Círdan’s people from Morgoth’s onslaught, and Círdan’s memory was long. Or Himring, if chancing the road north alone were not in itself a death sentence. 

But when Orodreth spoke, his tone was mild. “So you have not lost your habit of hiding in high places.”

“We are still underground,” Celebrimbor pointed out, resisting the childish urge to protest that he was not _hiding_. “Sire.”

Orodreth let out a distinctly unkingly snort. “Leave off, Tyelpë. I get enough of that from my courtiers. I do not need it from you.” He shifted backward so that he too could lean against the stone wall. “Do you remember King Ingwë’s visit to Tirion, when you presented his son a clockwork bird you had made? And you fled the dining hall when you thought that Vanyarin lady was making fun of it?”

Celebrimbor groaned, feeling his face heat at the memory. “Must you remind me?” 

He’d been so proud of that clockwork bird, a clumsy product of childish hands, and though he’d later realised the lady hadn’t meant to mock him, at the time the first peals of her laughter had sent him running. He’d dodged both Caranthir, who was supposed to be looking after him, and Indis, whom he escaped by ducking under a tablecloth, and retreated to a little storage space off one of the upper galleries. It had been Orodreth, then newly come of age, who found him some hours later, tears of mortification spent, asleep in a nest he’d made from unused drapery. 

“You refused to come out when I finally found you,” Orodreth went on. His face was out of Celebrimbor’s view, but there was a hint of a smile in his voice. 

“So you sat on a pile of curtains in a glorified linen closet and made up silly stories about all the Vanyarin nobles for the rest of the evening,” Celebrimbor finished. “And put up with your baby cousin following you around like a duckling for the next week, wheedling you for more and sillier stories.” Curufin, he remembered with a sudden pang, had been rather displeased by his son’s new attachment to his Finarfinian cousin. 

“I minded not. Truth be told, I was glad of the excuse to escape the party,” Orodreth confessed. 

Celebrimbor turned to look at him. The earlier sternness had bled from Orodreth’s face, and now he only looked unutterably tired. 

“Findaráto was the only one of us who truly _enjoyed_ court visits,” he continued, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. His voice didn’t shake, but it was thick with unspoken grief. 

“Oh.” _Say something more,_ Celebrimbor berated himself silently, but the words would not come. What else could he say? _I wish my father had not gotten your brother killed_? That hardly seemed adequate. What good would his apologies for his father’s deeds do now? _Findaráto would be proud of you,_ perhaps—but if it was reassurance Orodreth was seeking, surely it would sound hollow coming from Curufin’s son. 

“I told him we should turn back.” Orodreth sounded as though he were speaking more to himself than to Celebrimbor. “Did you know that? In Araman, after Alqualondë. All of my siblings wished to press on, even after the Kinslaying and the Doom. Not just him. I was the only one who wanted to return to Tirion.”

Celebrimbor swallowed hard.

“I did not know.” He had spent that treacherous time at the front of the Noldor host, hastened along by his father like a fly in a falcon's wake, with little news of Fingolfin’s and Finarfin’s followers apart from the rumours that came to Curufin—or were spread by him—of the betrayals they must be plotting. He braced himself, and asked, “Do you wish you had?”

Orodreth was silent for a long time. “My brother needed me. More, I judged, than my father did at the time.” Celebrimbor refrained from pointing out that he hadn’t quite answered the question. “I am not Findaráto, or our cousins; I never shared their ambitions of charting new lands and founding new cities. I am the younger son of a younger son of a king who was never meant to die. Did you know, Tyelpë, that you had to go back to accounts of the earliest days of the Great Journey to find treatises that dealt with political succession? In Tirion’s libraries, that is. We in Beleriand have written a great deal more on the subject since.”

Celebrimbor had never made such a thorough study of the histories, but he knew his cousin’s knowledge of the contents of Tirion’s vast libraries to be exhaustive. Surely, though, Orodreth had not sought him out simply to discuss scholarly lacunae. “I suppose we would not have needed much analysis of the topic in Valinor.”

Orodreth let out a sharp exhale. “We had very little idea of what we did or did not need, I think. I begin to suspect we have no better idea now.”

What had Celebrimbor thought he needed at the time? His father’s approval; a chance to prove himself against Morgoth; a sword. The thought of all three made him feel vaguely sick now. He had never thought of turning back, of course. Behind him lay only a city in darkness and a home rent apart, a great-grandfather murdered and a mother drowned by the sea’s wrath. He did not think he would have returned to Tirion, even if the idea had occurred to him. But…

“I am sorry, sire. I have not my father’s way with words. Or my uncle’s.” Curufin had been as exacting a teacher of rhetoric as he was of smithwork, but Celebrimbor had somehow never taken to the former as he had to the latter. “My talent lies in shaping metal and stone, not speech. Were I a better orator, I might have swayed more people away from their counsel sooner.” 

He left the rest unspoken: _Then your brother might have gone on his quest with more than ten followers to aid him. And he might yet live._

To his surprise, Orodreth smiled. It was a faint and mirthless smile, but it was there. “In truth I find it a great reassurance that you are not a better orator. I’ve rather had my fill of Fëanorians who have a way with words.” 

Celebrimbor winced.

“Tyelpë—” Orodreth bit off whatever he was going to say, and sighed. “No, never mind. Anyhow I thought I told you to leave off with the titles.”

“You are my king, now,” Celebrimbor said. 

Orodreth fixed him with a sharp look. “Very well. In that case as your king I would ask you to sit on my council.”

Celebrimbor gaped at him. Orodreth returned his gaze steadily.

“Sire, is that wise? Trusting me? Do you not fear betrayal?”

Orodreth raised an eyebrow, the expression making him look, for a moment, almost exactly like his fallen brother. “Should I?”

“I will not seek out my father, but I live yet in his shadow,” Celebrimbor told him, ignoring the painful squeeze of his chest as he said the words. A shadow he had never measured up to, and now would never be free of. “I cannot think adding me to your council will do aught to assuage the doubts of those who think it was ill-judged to harbour us in Nargothrond in the first place.”

“And I do not think keeping you to the shadows will do aught to remedy that. You have proven that you have your own mind and are willing to speak it. There is worth in that. And… you have proven yourself a friend.”

Celebrimbor swallowed past the tightness in his throat. “I was never trained to be a councillor. I told you—my skill lies in the work of my hands.”

“And I was never trained to be a king,” Orodreth responded grimly. “Yet we must do the work we are given.”

Celebrimbor met his eyes and, after a long moment, nodded. 

“Come, then,” Orodreth said, his voice gentler now. “No more hiding.”

He held out a hand.

“No more hiding,” Celebrimbor agreed, and took it.


End file.
